been having fun reading little bits of gamecrit on backloggd.. i feel like one of the more alienating things abt the professional turn of the last few years is that the writing around games got ever more reasonable and fair just as the list of games people felt like they could write about got ever shorter and more disspiriting, lots of "love it or hate it, THING has sold an enormous amount of copies, which is an accomplishment in itself!" and solemn efforts to identify the craft within the cruft... which often just feel like the flipside to the presentationally more abrasive but equally conservative Voice Of The Gamers video guy persona... i miss reading stuff that's excessive, that feels like someone trying to outrun and get an angle on their own tastes
(more thoughts on this behind a cut for convenience)
the thing abt professional life to me is that it's really only fun if you're inside of it... like if you are you then get to see all the interesting choices that happen in that system, and meet new people and exercise weird forms of restrained creativity and etc... but what actually comes out of that system is just a sort of slurry, being dumped into a tank somewhere and shipped off somewhere nobody involved has to look too closely at or think about
and i think a byproduct is that the fantasy these things most end up being able to sell is the fantasy of being a professional. you can see it in all those video essays that desperately try to add back some emotional value to AAA by speculating on the craft of the swamp textures or whatever, and in recent games crit where it's almost like the true protagonist of whatever comes out is the development team itself - where nothing the game can offer is as meaningful as our own experiences of professional drudgery or precarity, as reflected back at us in a more heroic light as the struggles of the development team itself, converted into myth, a kind of whitecollar tomb raider where our heroic gamedevsonas dodge an executive spiketrap here, a pitfall into crunch there. again the goal is almost to get to a point where the "externality", the work itself, disappears completely, where we no longer have to think about it
the games writing i mostly enjoy reading is by people talking about stuff they've sort of sat with for years, and kept coming back to in their heads.. which for the most part means the stuff they latched onto as a child. i think it's only partially that people just "naturally" form their strongest attractions to things early on... maybe it's also just that being at an age outside the workforce (ideally, libertarian objections aside) means you end up being faced with that output, that slurry, head-on. the real face of vgames - stuff your grandma gets you, illegal roms that can be played on cheap computers, free hobbyist software, brutally exploitative f2p, braintape mainstream stuff that ends up occupying the same "space" as colourful little oddities, where one no longer has to be excused with reference to the other. i think one reason i'm fascinated by games writing by people a decade younger than me is bc i think the only way to get a sense of what "indie games" really means, or is worth, is by seeing it in this way - as the ungainly byproduct output of a narrative people were caught up in at the time but that nobody now remembers. and the answer is generally: not great!!
